The EU’s faltering neighbourhood initiatives

A year ago, the EU launched a new flagship programme to deepen links with its eastern neighbours, the Eastern Partnership. Two years ago, the EU launched a flagship programme with its neighbours to the south, the Union for the Mediterranean. Today, both initiatives are languishing.

Leaders from the 40-odd countries that are members of the Union for the Mediterranean will have little to celebrate when they gather on 7 June in Barcelona, the seat of its secretariat. The Union spent most of its first year in paralysis, with the Arab League demanding a seat at the table and Israel’s war on Gaza of December 2008 making Arab leaders even less inclined to engage with the Israeli government. It was only in January this year that Ahmad Masadeh, Jordan’s ambassador to the EU and NATO, was appointed secretary-general, and it was March before its statute was adopted.

There have been advances in some of the six countries that make up the Eastern Partnership, including a transition to a more democratic order in Moldova and a smooth and democratic presidential election in Ukraine. But the Eastern Partnership cannot claim to have had much to do with either development.

Ineffective partnerships

So far, then, neither the Mediterranean scheme nor its eastern counterpart – the two projects that make up the bulk of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) – has proven to be transformative. Nonetheless, on 12 May, when he presented the Commission’s annual report on the ENP, Štefan Füle, the European commissioner for enlargement and the ENP, maintained that the EU can act as a “transformative soft power spreading stability and prosperity beyond the enlargement area”.

But the examples cited by Füle will convince few people.

The Euro Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) – a precursor of the Union for the Mediterranean launched in 1995 – “helped to lay the ground for a free-trade zone, which will be completed in a few years’ time”, the report says. “Co-operation was established in a wide range of areas such as civil protection, culture, youth exchanges and gender issues.”

Technical co-operation

None of these is a problem area for the countries on the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern littoral, either domestically or in their relations with the EU. These are precisely the areas in which both sides have an interest in technical co-operation – an interest because they are completely devoid of any political dimension.

This focus on technical co-operation has carried over into the Union for the Mediterranean. What has changed since the EMP is that the EU’s main interest has now shifted to counter-terrorism and controlling illegal migration. Many would view these as politically problematic issues. But, again, the EU has chosen to take a technical approach, a focus that has played into the hands of the region’s authoritarian regimes.

The Eastern Partnership is more political; one of its four priorities sectors concerns democracy and good governance. But events in Ukraine and Moldova suggest that it is the domestic situation that now drives transformation, rather than EU approval. It is doubtful whether the incentives offered by the EU will be enough to drive reform in places where the local elites are not already committed to it.